DSA at a Crossroads by Andrew Sernatinger, Tempest, August 19 https://www.tempestmag.org/2020/08/dsa-at-a-crossroads/
. . . "Without some kind of infrastructure-building, all of DSA’s work is mediated through other organizations and we actually don’t live up to our potential. A socialist organization has to be the extension of workers’ and oppressed peoples’ own struggles and self-activity and has to lead and take initiatives in our fight for socialism. . . . "At the center of this question is our concept of the relationship between struggle, movements, and elections. This is underlined by the experience of the rebellion these last few months, where the explosion of popular anger over racist police violence and the mostly Democratic municipalities that support that violence was able to challenge the legitimacy of the state and win concessions previously unthinkable. Any strategy that doesn’t recognize the role of uprisings, mass strikes, and other semi-spontaneous clashes will miss the lifebeat of class struggle. "Organizationally, DSA still has many vestiges of its pre-2017 self. Many of the internal structures are holdovers from a group that was largely a paper-member nonprofit. If democracy means “the people rule”, DSA isn’t really all that democratic. How can DSA transform into a robust, democratic, and member-led organization? This isn’t an organizational side dish beside the main meal—democracy is going to be essential to having an organization with its members’ confidence if we’re going to make it through the coming years. While we champion direct officer elections in the United Auto Workers, this isn’t something DSA has instituted for itself. How will information be dispersed, and decisions be brought to members to decide the course of the organization rather than rely on the contours of a leadership and its caucus politics? If decisions stay behind closed doors, members view the organization as external to them and begin to divest from it. In a digital age, it shouldn’t be hard to incorporate plebiscites and polls to determine major policy and direction." . . . -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#899): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/899 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76443421/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
